e a t e r y R O W

PEANUT BUTTER & CO.

240 Sullivan Street

New York, NY 10012

(212) 617-3995

There have been a spate of restaurants opening in recent years that focus on a single dish served in a variety of ways. Meatball Shop is a perfect example of this, and so too Peanut Butter & Co. in the West Village. Peanut butter sandwiches naturally make up the majority of their menu. There are other items for sure, like salad, but ordering one of those seems to defeat the whole point. 

So, the other day, a buddy of mine, Pike, was reading the New York Magazine food blog Grub Street, and came across an article from the past summer listing the best 101 sandwiches in New York City. Peanut Butter & Co. was in the list, cheap ,and was right next to the subway. Plus, one of the top 101 sandwiches in a city of a billion sandwiches? How could we not go?  Long Story short, Grub Street was wrong.

The staff was very friendly, it's absolutely a place that kids will love, the food came quickly, we got a table right away, you can't beat the nostalgia value, and while they're not giving anything away, it's not terribly pricey either. It's a comfortable place to sit and enjoy what amounts to jazzed up comfort food. But the bottom line is that we were pretty let unimpressed. I think that, deep down, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is already so close to perfection that improving upon it is a thankless task (I say this despite the fact that there are at least a dozen other blogs and food critics who get paid who disagree with me and have been thanking these guys for two years). There are a few, additions to be sure, that are good, like adding cream cheese, but you can do that at home any time you want with virtually no effort. So it makes sense to order something that would be time consuming. But Pike and I just felt that they don't work very well.

Pike ordered the Grub Street fave, The Elvis. Peanut butter, bacon, banana and honey on toast.  Was it decent? Yeah. Was it worthy of being in NYMag's top 100 list? No. My choice was The Heat Is On. Peanut butter, cold grilled chicken, and pineapple marmalade on white bread. The chicken was so heavily spiced that I could barely taste anything except it. I like things hot, but I also have this thing about flavor, and there simply wasn't any here.

Now, before you go thinking I'm all negative, we did not order any desserts, all of which looked pretty good. So maybe I'll come back for one of them. But the sandwiches were damn heavy and there was no way we could fit anything else in. In an ideal world, I'd also return and try one of the many other sandwiches that we obviously couldn't get to. But this time, I won't be quite as giddy as a kid in a peanut butter store.

BLUEPRINT

196 Fifth Avenue

Brooklyn, NY 11217

(718) 622-6644

Cocktail-centric gastropubs have become a force to be reckoned with in Brooklyn. Blueprint, one of the latest to emerge in the borough borrows heavily from the formula. Dark woods, good drinks, rich grubs. So it's not original by any stretch, but it is good. Indeed, it does just about everything right. Though I'd lose the gangsta rap soundtrack, which almost seems to be played in irony, the vibe is spot-on comfortable. The staff was super nice, the food was good, the beer was fantastic and the well liquor is top shelf.

Seth is planning on planting his flag in Brooklyn, as any good follower of this blog is well aware. And after bouncing from a walk-up in Prospect Heights to another in Sunset Park, we decided to split meet up, grab some dinner and get our shit-face on here in the Slope. Okay, so I may have mentioned that Blueprint is much like Rye is much like Char No. 4 is much like Fort Defiance. But I liked it. A lot."Come on," Seth said after I commented about this trend. "You know that if they opened up in your neighborhood, you'd stick a cot in the corner and move right on in." It's true. I would.

Half of the menu a Blueprint is meats and cheese, like a wine bar would have. The other half is a kinda-sorta small plates menu. Some are truly small plates which I will term an "appetizer". The larger plates I will give the random description of "entree". Seth didn't bother with the "appetizer" but I couldn't help myself. I ordered the Baby Octopus, a salad of cold potatoes and salsa verde with little whole grilled baby octopi. Fantastic. I don't care if you don't think you'd like octopus, you'd like this. Everything came at once, so while I was having a good ol' time with my app, Seth was enjoying his Blueprint Rabbit Pot Pie. Pot pie is an underrated food group. My dad makes the world's best pot pie and he stole his recipe from a Betty Crocker cookbook from 1965. While this didn't live up to the Dad Standard set my a corporate giant during the McCarthy era, it was still pretty good. Rabbit is more tender than your average meat (largely due to the muscle tissue being continuously massaged/petted by second graders on field trips) and it's also much sweeter (from those same field trip kisses that the rabbits get so many of). As a result, you're left with a meat that reminiscent of the dark meat of a chicken that's been glazed in maple syrup. If this sounds appetizing, I suggest you order some rabbit. My only complaint was that the crust was one of those annoying puff pastry crusts that looks good in photos but tastes like bread-flavored air. It added almost nothing except a soggy copy-paper texture after a few bites. My dinner was the Grass-Fed Beef Bourguignon served with a side of au gratin potatoes. Blueprint prides itself on using locally grown vegetables and locally raised meat. Their website even lists the farms that they order from. I happen to think that organic food is a scam perpetrated on the dumb by the crafty, but I am very much in favor of locally-obtained non-factory-made food. If I want that mass market stuff, I'll eat at Cracker Barrel. But I digress. The beef was great. Super tender, super sweet, super why didn't they give me four times as much? And maybe it's because I've cut so much starch from my diet that you could throw a potato in manure and I'd still love it, but damn was that au gratin good!

PAINKILLER

49 Essex Street

New York, NY 10002

(212) 777-8454

Usually, you crave warm weather cocktails (mai-tais, diaquiris, pina coladas, etc.) in the summer, or maybe when you're on vacation someplace where the summer never goes away, like the Caribbean. But sometimes, you want the illusion of summer. The illusion of a vacation. Lina and I decided to go see The Rum Diaries, a movie about a guy in the 1960s drinking booze like it was water and breathing cigarette smoke like it was the fresh country air, all in the Caribbean. Painkiller, a tiki bar with a classic tropical cocktail menu, seemed appropriate. And, in hindsight, it was far, far better than the movie, which was pretty awful.

The cocktails at Painkiller hearken to that pre and post-WWII era when Hawaiian shirts weren't just for pensioners on a golf course. The interior is wrapped in bamboo like a Tahitian hut and the walls are covered in tiki masks (and inner-city graffiti?). The soundtrack is all either oldies or the kind of reggae white people like (Bob Marley, Chaka Demus, etc.). The first time I tried to go here was a year ago and it was like trying to squeeze into a sardine can, but this time, it was calm. We got a table right away and it never really crowded up. Clearly, winter's the time to go.

I got to Painkiller slightly ahead of Lina so I nursed a Missionary's Downfall in a small booth. Rum, pineapple juice, lime juice, mint, honey, peach, and topped off with a garnish so thick you need a machete just to get your straw in. The drink was so physically tall that I needed to take it off the table and stick it in my lap just to drink it. It was effectively a mojito with pineapple juice. By the time Lina arrived, I was left with a big glass filled with what had become green ice. While I thought about my next cocktail, Lina ordered a Dying Bastard. Painkiller has a few cocktails that they consider signatures of the establishment, each with a wacky history described on the menu. It also has a few pages with a huge range of daiquiris, punches, frozen drinks, fizzes, and "strong" drinks (they'll only give you one per sitting) that have names, but no ingredient list that I can regurgitate for you. The Dying Bastard was a fizz that was very ginger heavy. I ended up with the 1934 Zombie Punch, the drink you see below served in Charlie Chan's head. This is Painkiller's signature strong drink. Three different rums, lime juice, grapefruit juice, grenadine, falernum, and absinthe. And damn was it strong. I didn't notice it at first, but then, about a half hour later, I suddenly realized I had gotten loud and thought I was way funnier than I normally do. It was probably a good thing I stopped there. I hate looking back and realizing that I was "that guy" on the subway. Okay okay. It just about knocked me on my ass.

Drinks here average about $14 each except for the higher octane ones, which will run you $16.